The change they want won't be given to them.

Shortly after crawling out of the bunker he appears to have retreated into during the worst of the confrontations between cops and people protesting the police killing of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man in Ferguson, Mo., Mayor James Knowles scoffed at the suggestion of his unpopularity.

More than unbridled hyperbole, the mayor's bluster is the loose talk of a politician who swims in the still waters of the political apathy that inundates Ferguson's black community. A white Republican in a city whose residents are overwhelmingly black and Democratic, Knowles was not a wildly popular pick for mayor. He got the job in 2011 by winning 49% of the votes cast in an election the Los Angeles Times says was dominated by whites, who are just 29% of the city's population.

In Ferguson, black indifference to the political process is as thick as the tear gas that police used to break the ranks of the crowds of people, most of them young and black, who took to the streets to decry the killing of the unarmed teen. In a place that boasts being named a Playful City USA — recognition given to cities that are fun places for children — these confrontations were just further proof of the Jekyll and Hyde nature of life in the St. Louis suburb.

The protesters demanded change. They want more blacks on Ferguson's police force. Just three of its 53 officers are black. They want to see change in City Hall, where just one of six council members is black. They want change on a school board that's made up of six whites and one Hispanic. But the change they want won't be given to them.

"Protests tend to be spontaneous, with little or no preliminary activity required," Norfolk State University professor Elsie Barnes, a specialist in urban administration and politics, told me. "Running for office …requires an organizational structure that takes time and resources to put in place."

Barnes looks at these things with the well-trained eyes of a political scientist. I see them — and so should those who want to bring positive change to Ferguson — through the consciousness of Frederick Douglass, the great 19th century social and political activist.

Many people remember that Douglass said: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." But it is what came next in that 1857 speech that ought to make blacks in Ferguson rush to register and vote to elect a government — and compel creation of a police force — that's more reflective of their interests. "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to," Douglass went on to say, "and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them."

For too long, blacks in Ferguson submitted to their misgivings about the value of elections. They stayed away from the polls in droves and largely left it to a white minority to pick the city's leaders. For too long they acquiesced in maintenance of a police department that made traffic stops of black motorists at a disproportionately high rate, even though they seized more contraband from white motorists. The heavy-handed use of tear gas and rubber bullets to scatter crowds of protesters in the wake of Brown's death simply pressed the limits of what blacks in Ferguson were willing to submit.

The clinical view of the plight of Ferguson's black population might yet hold. Maybe they will continue to reserve their spontaneity for street demonstrations and leave the political process to those who have guided that city to its current intersection with history.

But I hope they make no such concession.

DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan State University's School of Global Journalism and Communication, writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.